Unless it’s a spirited game of Risk, it’s not nice to play politics with children. But Russia’s been doing it for years. When America passed the 2012 Magnitsky Act to punish foreign human-rights abuses, Russia retaliated by banning U.S. adoptions.

More recently, the ban has widened to include countries with same-sex marriage laws; an Oakville couple (straight, by the way) featured in the documentary On Putin’s Blacklist had their adoption-in-progress halted because Russia said the baby might one day wind up in the care of homosexuals.

Vancouver director Boris Ivanov explores this and other homophobic aspects of the former Soviet republic. At one point, we hear President Vladimir Putin explaining that he only supports a ban on advocating homosexuality and pedophilia, which is different from the acts. He seems oblivious to the fact that homosexuality and pedophilia are themselves two wildly different things.